Buddha Bob Munden

Bob Munden is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest man with a gun who has ever lived, and we’re not talking about a 4×100 metre relay with gun in hand.

Of the eighteen world records you can hold in fast draw shooting—the sport of drawing and shooting a gun in the manner of wild west lore—Bob has held all eighteen since 1960, and he holds them still in his ultra steady hand. This fastest gunslinger than the rest has won 3,500 trophies and 800 major championships, and while his picture might be on the back of cereal boxes, his sheriff’s badge didn’t come out of one.

gallery14aIs Bob the fastest man with a gun alive? Yes, but that’s barely grazing the surface of his intergalactic prowess. Friends, humans and countrymen, Bob Munden is the fastest human being alive. Fire away Bob, tell us just how fast you are…

“Fast draw is the fastest thing a human being does…”

Bob Munden is a straight shooter. Being interviewed, he drawls but never hesitates before taking aim, and if certainty was a target, he would hit the bulls-eye every time.

Being interviewed, Bob Munden doesn’t just tell the television reporter how fast he is—he verbally shoots his questioner directly between the eyes, for so fast is this dead-eye gunslinger, he can answer questions even before they are asked.

“Nobody does anything faster than what I do with guns…”

Which was a statement, not answer or explanation. Like Newton or Einstein, Sheriff Bob is laying down the law—of physics and of time.

Bob MundenSlightly slower than Bob Munden on the universal scale of speed, a barely perceptible flicker of doubt fires across the television interviewer’s mind. Suspicious, the reporter takes aim, queries: “Can you give it a comparison to something that would come close?”

“The speed of light…” drawls big shot Bob, laconically, and uncharacteristically slowly. “There is nothing next to it.”

Is this man fast with the truth as well? Is he on a supersonic flight of fancy that only reality can rein in?

Bob Munden may talk fast and loose, but his gun is quicker than even his tongue. Already believers, a crowd of Western movie extras gather, stand and applaud his every move at a shooting demonstration, stiffly. In less than two one hundredths of one second, Bob will blow all of their minds.

“It’s a number we’re not familiar with…”

Two hundredths of one second is the time it takes Bob to fire and hit a target; draw, cock, level, fire, shoot and hit almost at the speed of light. One day we may build space ships fast enough to go where only Bob has gone before. Bob Munden, star of shooting may go supernova one day, explode into empty space with the sound of his gun his only reminder, like speeding light from a long dead star.

Bob Munden lives in moments unexplored by humanity—he shoots his gun faster than you or I can think. Bob may just be consciousness itself—the acme of sense and thought, the sea upon which the human mind floats. Does Bob fire the gun, or is Bob the gun itself; trigger, bullet and mind at one?

“He shot two and it sounded like it was one shot,” the reporter exclaims upon viewing Bob burst two balloons mounted meters apart, faster than you or I could shoot one. Faster than you or I could shoot none would be a more mathematically correct description of the scene.

“Here’s one going into the gun.” Bob Munden may fire with bullets, but he talks with poetry.

At the shooing demonstration, but not entirely on the same planet, the reporter again declares that “two shots are going to sound like one.” Is this a moment of Zen, a moment of universal oneness, or a song by U2 from 1983?

Stuck with the rest of us in the everyday dimensions of time and space, the television reporter is clearly unable to comprehend the singularity of Bob Munden’s genius. What is the sound of one gun firing? Silence in the infinite forest of Bob Munden’s Buddha-mind.

10 Comments
  • pavitrata
    Posted at 10:44h, 15 March

    Back in the day he would have been a marked man. Check this from Bob Dylan’s ‘Brownsville Girl’ track!

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    ‘Well, there was this movie I seen one time,
    About a man riding ‘cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck.
    He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself.
    The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck.

    Well, the marshal, now he beat that kid to a bloody pulp
    as the dying gunfighter lay in the sun and gasped for his last breath.
    Turn him loose, let him go, let him say he outdrew me fair and square,
    I want him to feel what it’s like to every moment face his death.’

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    I hear Pecan Pete is already packing his pony to look for Bob!

  • Jaitra Gillespie
    Posted at 12:22h, 15 March

    Thanks for that Pavitrata. The acclaimed HBO series and wild west depiction Deadwood begins in much the same manner as this Dylan song, and its use of language—with full credit to creator and writer David Milch—is often transcendent, and near Shakespearean. It is also worth noting that an episode of the same series does hold the world record for swearing in a television drama—a feat in words that must be said to be somewhat the opposite of transcendent.

  • pavitrata
    Posted at 08:29h, 16 March

    The Deadwood series didn’t show in the UK. Sounds interesting!

    Re the swearing episode. Hmm. We need a word for that. Decadent + transcendent inversed. Decascendent?

  • Alf
    Posted at 21:13h, 16 March

    When I was young, a comedian came to my school. She asked, “Wanna see the quickest draw in the West?”

    “Yes,” we cried, in unison.

    “Wanna see it again?” she asked.

  • Jaitra Gillespie
    Posted at 21:15h, 16 March

    I don’t see it…

  • Spencer
    Posted at 20:58h, 16 January

    Bob can talk s**t as well as he performs, which is saying a lot. Truly fascinating. He is completely self-aware.

  • paul in los angeles
    Posted at 09:46h, 23 February

    Bob Munden is my cousin, and I can tell you absolutely truthfully, that to develope his speed draw, he shot 4,500 rounds of ammunition every four days for eight years, and that – speed record or no speed record – is a fact.

  • Jaitra
    Posted at 13:36h, 23 February

    I don’t think there’s any denying that Bob is the fastest draw around.

  • Kevin D. Smith
    Posted at 19:33h, 10 March

    The first time I saw Bob demonstrate his ability, he fired all six shots and it sounded like one. I don’t believe anyone will ever beat his records.

  • Jaitra
    Posted at 12:51h, 19 March

    I completely agree with you Kevin. Bob is virtually god-like in his ability to fire a gun!

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